When you think of Shadow the Hedgehog these days, you think of Star Wars. The constant mutterings of Hero or Dark side has pretty much become stagnant, but surprisingly fights a plausible case in the black one’s very own game.

Playing as the verse’s only representative of angst, you zip along levels, bounce off robots, collect rings and try to stop a greater evil. That’s where the similarities end pretty much - you have a choice of missions to complete, you bounce off humans and aliens as well, can choose to shoot them down and your greater evil is all dependant on your story path.

SONICTEAM have impressively managed to avoid a dire reason for searching Shadow’s past a THIRD time running by wrapping a nice, twisted storyline around it. Takashi Iizuka at his best, Shadow the Hedgehog returns fans to the bleak and dark world we last knew in Sonic Adventure 2. The world is being attacked by a new evil - the Black Arms. It’s leader, Black Doom approaches Shadow in the best Dr. Claw impression, stating that our antihero promised to bring them the Chaos Emeralds. Shadow sets forth to uncover these gems, as he snags that whatever promise he made and whatever secrets his past has will be revealed once he ‘catches ‘em all’. The story is quite impressive, and it’s taken a paragraph to write about it because not since SA2 has such a moody outlook been successfully created on such a happy and bouncy video game series.

In fact, there’s a lot to be appreciated in Shadow the Hedgehog, because it’s not a Sonic game and it doesn’t follow the standard gameplay procedure. Yet the game fails to aid the player and inform them that this is a very different game to Sonic Adventure 2. Your first play will no doubt be insanely confusing, and there won’t be much help from the game alerting you to goal differences.

The levels range from extremely linear to the confusingly free-roaming, which makes for a bit of inconsistency in the design. Stages such as Westopolis and GUN Fortress are boringly simple “run forward” affairs, while Central City and The Ark result in you running around in circles on your first agitated attempt. Mad Matrix appears to be one of the only stages that has a decent mix of these extremes. However with a little bit of practice and trial and error you start to enjoy these levels much more.

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